Nearly six months after a cartoon mocking Serena Williams unleashed immediate international rebuke, with critics calling it a racist Jim-Crow-era-like rendering of the sports star, the Australian Press Council weighed in on Monday, defending the image.

Seated in a Riverside County, Calif., courtroom on Friday, David Turpin, 57, and Louise Turpin, 50, pleaded guilty to 14 counts related to crimes against 12 of their children, in a case that captured worldwide attention for its levels of depravity.

Each parent pleaded guilty to one count of torture, four counts of false imprisonment, six counts of cruelty to an adult dependent and three counts of willful child cruelty, according to Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin.

Botswana, home to the world's largest elephant population, is moving toward culling the numbers of the giant mammals by lifting awildlife hunting ban, after a group of Cabinet ministers endorsed the move.

Thursday at the Vatican, Pope Francis stood before some 200 participants in an unprecedented summit on preventing clergy sex abuse and said Catholics are seeking not simply "condemnations" but "concrete, effective measures."

But a crisis that has crossed borders and generations, lacerating the church and shaking the pope's credibility, is standing in the way as he seeks to forge a path ahead.

Human rights violations and abuses that have grown routine against civilians and children in the world's youngest country, may constitute war crimes, according to a new report by the U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan outlining acts of brutality committed in 2018.

Beleaguered USA Gymnastics has named a new president and CEO — its fourth in two years — as the sport's governing body battles criticism that it ignored and even enabled widespread sex abuse by former team doctor Larry Nassar.

At 2:21 p.m. on Feb. 14, 2018, the first gunshots began to reverberate through the hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, leaving 14 students and three educators dead; 17 others were wounded.

A truck bomb attack on a bus carrying members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killed 27 Guards and wounded 13 others in the southeastern Sistan and Baluchistan Province on Wednesday, according to Iranian media reports.

In a grim rite, officers from across the New York City Police Department stood and saluted Tuesday night under a cold drizzle outside Jamaica Hospital Medical Center as the remains of a detective, believed to have been caught in the crosshairs of fellow law enforcement, were driven past in an ambulance.

A tiger alarmed a woman who was sneaking into a seemingly abandoned Houston home to smoke marijuana on Monday. Now it has found a new home of its own.

The Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary located about 200 miles north of Houston, announced it was welcoming the tiger, according to Lara Cottingham, spokeswoman for Houston's Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department, which oversees the city's animal shelter that had been caring for the animal.

A dozen people who helped lead Catalonia's failed secession bid more than a year ago entered the Supreme Court in Madrid on Tuesday to face charges including rebellion, criminal organization and the misappropriation of public funds — holding Spain in the grips of a highly politicized televised trial.

A prominent Bahraini soccer player, who had been facing a decade behind bars in his home country on disputed arson charges, was released from a Bangkok prison Monday after extradition charges against him were dropped.

Hakeem al-Araibi, 25, who had been living as a refugee in Australia with permanent resident status, will return there, the country's prime minister, Scott Morrison, said.

Around three-quarters of a century after the Holocaust ended with the extermination of six million Jews, some survivors, as well as victims' families and estates, are receiving reparations from France, in acknowledgment of the government's role in deporting them to Nazi death camps via French trains.

A vast system that brought snow and cold to normally milder cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City and even Las Vegas was moving eastward into the central part of the country on Wednesday. The country's midsection from New Mexico to Michigan was blanketed in frozen precipitation. The system caused treacherous travel, shuttered schools and even closed ski resorts.

A panicked leopard ran through the streets of Jalandhar in northern India on Thursday as residents thronged and scattered, if not to help catch the big cat then to capture a cellphone image of the jarring scene.

Video shared on social media shows residents swarming as the leopard darts down alleyways and up over walls. At one point, a man perched atop a barrier attempts to catch the leopard in a net; instead, the animal charges at the man, knocking him off the wall before continuing on its way.

At least 21 people were killed and dozens injured in a car bomb blast at a police academy in Colombia's capital, Bogotá, on Thursday morning, according to officials, who called it a terrorist act.

Columbia's defense minister blamed the attack on a leftist rebel group called the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has carried out occasional attacks in the country. The bombing has stoked anxiety about a return to the decades when innocent Colombians got caught up in conflicts with rebel groups and drug cartels.

Eight people were arrested in Melbourne, Australia, accused in the trafficking of millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs into the country over a period of months, two of them airline cabin crew members accused of smuggling the drugs via "body packing," officials announced Wednesday.

There is more than just January's cold currently gripping the city of Westbrook, Maine. An immense, icy disk doing a solitary pirouette on the Presumpscot River is dazzling observers, local and distant alike.

Scientists say the disk is naturally occurring and has been seen before. Most of us have spotted eddies in flowing water, that is when a cross current creates a small whirlpool. But winter's cold adds a whiff of mystery to this phenomenon.

Cleveland Hopkins International Airport temporarily shut down water fountains in its Concourse A and is sanitizing them after several passengers became ill aboard a Tampa-bound Frontier Airlines flight on Tuesday.

At least six passengers were stricken and "the primary symptom was vomiting," Janet Scherberger, spokeswoman for Tampa International Airport, told NPR in an email. "It appears the six individuals did not have any connection to each other."

A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a lawsuit filed by family members and victims of the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., that accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of knowingly supporting ISIS and helping the group spread its radical beliefs.

Fourteen people died and 22 were injured when Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire at a holiday office party on Dec. 2, 2015.

A dozen people have been injured in two separate car attacks, after authorities say motorists deliberately plowed through New Year's crowds celebrating in Germany and Japan just after the clock struck midnight.

In Western Germany, Münster Police say a 50-year-old man apparently set out on a rampage to kill foreigners in the first hour of 2019 in the city of Bottrop.

A man who says he is the brother of U.S. citizen Paul Whelan — who was arrested in Moscow last week on suspicion of spying — is proclaiming his brother's innocence and providing more detail to an opaque case.

On Tuesday, David Whelan tweeted a family statement, saying Paul Whelan was in Moscow to attend a wedding and that the family grew concerned after not hearing from the retired U.S. Marine on Friday, "which was very much out of character for him even when he was traveling."

The U.S. Strategic Command is charged with controlling the nation's nuclear operations, but conceded it missed the mark with a New Year's Eve tweet comparing the famed ball drop to a B-2 bomber dropping weapons.

"TimesSquare tradition rings in the #NewYear by dropping the big ball...if ever needed, we are #ready to drop something much, much bigger," read the now-deleted tweet from Stratcom's official account.

This week, 1-month-old Joy was vaccinated against hepatitis and tuberculosis. Those are standard childhood vaccinations, but there was something definitely non-standard about the way they reached Joy. They arrived by drone.

Joy and her mom, Julie Nowai, live on Erromango, part of Vanuatu, an island nation made up of some 80 Pacific islands, lying west of Fiji. With very few airfields, paved roads or available refrigeration in Vanuatu, around one in five children do not receive vaccines, according to the government.

A quick glance at the place where West Alexis and Secor roads meet in Toledo, Ohio, reveals just another intersection of concrete and capitalism: A Western Union, a gym and a chicken joint frame the flow of traffic. But out of a crack in the curb, a scrawny weed pushes forth that has come to embody a city's holiday cheer.

University of Toledo student Alyssa Emrick, 20, tells NPR that she and her family had often driven past the weed recently on their way to and from church. Then on Dec. 9, a light went off for her father, Troy.